Make-believe: Patriarchy and Ambiguity in Chapter 36 of Saint Bernard, by Graciliano Ramos, and in “Nothing and Our Condition”, by Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

For a long time, it was believed that Brazil, after the 1930 Revolution and the Juscelino Kubitscheck Government, had achieved the basic premises of a Rule of Law. However, the integration of the country's poor masses, who remained far from citizenship, did not seem to be part of the reforms and liberal promises contained in the developmental campaigns of both periods. In other words, remnants of colonial sociability seemed to be integrated into the country's modernization, which took on peculiar contours. The representation of this complex process that lasted three centuries seems to be present in the make-believe of Paulo Honório, protagonist of the novel São Bernardo (1934), by Graciliano Ramos, and Tio Man'Antônio, hero of “Nothing and our condition”, a short story from the book First stories (1962), by Guimarães Rosa, they create to reform themselves and the world, suggesting more egalitarian sociability. Thus, this article analyzes how the fictionalization of reforms by two representatives of the order counteracts the nonconformities of the social process of private accumulation and assimilation of poor free men in different historical moments of the Nation.